Hello, im looking at purchasing the above kit in Australia to trace and intermittent fault on a vehicle.Is it possible to set this unit up to log as the fault is not always there,and at this stage it appears to be a spark issue as it happens on both petrol and gas.I did read an article here about setting a trigger value to start the process to collect data but not knowing what that value would be i dont know if i can log it.Have done some research on some scopes and the pico unit looks good.

brettless01 wrote:Hello, im looking at purchasing the above kit in Australia to trace and intermittent fault on a vehicle.Is it possible to set this unit up to log as the fault is not always there,and at this stage it appears to be a spark issue as it happens on both petrol and gas.I did read an article here about setting a trigger value to start the process to collect data but not knowing what that value would be i dont know if i can log it.Have done some research on some scopes and the pico unit looks good.

thanks Brett

You certainly could set the scope up to log, but who would want to sift through that much information? As mentioned in the article you refer to it would make better sense to set the scope up, via trigger, to start "logging" when the failure occurred. Perhaps you could elaborate more on what type of failure or issue you are trying to capture so we have a better chance to help you set up the scope in a manner to give you the best chance of capturing the issue.

I think I see what you are saying. In order to trigger on the fault you would need to know some basic characteristics of the fault to set a trigger on it.

If the vehicle stalls when the fault occurs, this makes things easy. You can set a repeat trigger on any signal that will stop when the engine does. Then select three more signals of interest, place a lot of time on the screen and just go away and work on something else.

This works well because, the scope will stop acquiring when trigger is lost, so...

Later, when you see the vehicle is no longer running, you can look at the data you captured and see what was happening before and during the failure. No need to babysit the scope while you wait for that intermittent stall.

The Pico advantage here over other choices is the ability to do very long capture times while maintaining robust sample rates with the ability to trigger the capture.

_________________Tom Roberts (The Picotologist) http://www.autonerdz.comskype: autonerdz THE PicoScope Automotive Authority In North America